Iain Sinclair Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

My contribution today is titled Walking with buildings. The flâneur and the (im)mobilizing power of non-human narrators and aims to reflect on the contrasting encounter between the apparent immobility of buildings, as non-human inert bodies, and the peculiar mobility of the flâneur. I said apparent immobility because my provocation starts precisely from the idea that buildings, despite their inertia, have an intrinsic power to mobilize our gaze and move our feet: my proposal is to imagine them as non-human narrators that invite the flâneur to move in the city both vertically, discovering changes in time, and horizontally, exploring connections in space. Furthermore, as (im)mobile concrete archives, buildings invite us to reflect once again on the peculiarity of the flâneur’s mobility, which is made of a constant alternation between walking and resting, listening and writing practices. Even if always on the move, the flâneur constantly takes time for slow practices like resting, reflect and writing, thus resisting through his own body to the rapid flows of contemporary cities and neoliberal rhythms.
I will explore these suggestions by proposing three examples: first, a graphic novel by Will Eisner published in 1987 and titled "The building"; second, "Living with buildings and walking with ghosts" the latest work by the well-known psychogeographer Iain Sinclair, which appeared in 2018 and became also an exhibition; third, a personal flânerie in the Brutalist Robin Hood Gardens Estate, that I’ve realised in February 2019 while I was living in Tower Hamlets, East London. Following Sinclair’s exploration, I will focus on brutalist estates as architectural bodies that have peculiar stories to tell thanks, to their controversial and critical position in contemporary London as in many other cities. But, How can we listen to voices of buildings, interpreting them as non-human narrators that keep stories hidden in them? Furthermore, “is there a link between the walking and storytelling practice of the flâneur and the encounter with the (im)mobilities
of buildings?”

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- Cultural Geography, Architecture, Comics Studies, Literary Geography

Chapter 14: Postmodern cities. 5,000 words. This chapter discusses the two principal strands of the postmodern city novel: texts in which the city is presented as a verbal labyrinth,
simulacrum, or technoscape (e. g. the fiction of Auster, Borges, Calvino, Murakami, Pamuk), and texts that depict the city as conceived in postmodern urbanist discourse: the city defined by branded spaces – consumerist simulacra of properly historical urban spaces – existing amidst dilapidated interstitial spaces (e.g., Martin Amis, Bret Easton Ellis, Chuck Palahniuk, José Saramago, Iain Sinclair, but including novels of any comparable city wherever sited), and the entwining of the two strands as the city and the lives it sustains work out their entropic trajectories, primarily absent the sort of crisis that qualifies the fictional city as properly dystopian. The presentation of the subject locates the literature in relation to poststructuralist thought or theories of postmodern urban and social theory by citing relevant theorists. It identifies, as appropriate, the presence and force of redemptive energies in the literature, and highlights the engagements with, and critiques of the history and enabling ideologies of postwar urban (re)development to the extent that they present themselves in the content and the form of the texts discussed.

- by Nick Bentley
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- Postmodernism, Haruki Murakami, Postmodernism (Literature), Doris Lessing
- by Niall Martin
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- English Literature, History Of London, Archives, Iain Sinclair
- by Nick Bentley
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- Salman Rushdie, Angela Carter, Ian McEwan, Graham Swift
- by Eszter Szép
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- Visual Studies, Visual Culture, Comics Studies, Psychogeography

This paper is concerned with urban walking and the work of contemporary artists and writers who take to the streets in order to explore, excavate and map hidden spaces and paths in the city. The focus is on an audio-walk by the Canadian artist Janet Cardiff entitled The missing voice (case study B), which is set in east London. Connections are also drawn with other recent projects in the same area by Rachel Lichtenstein and Iain Sinclair. The paper discusses how these artists raise important issues about the cultural geographies of the city relating to subjectivity, representation and memory. Cardiff’s audio-walk in particular works with connections between the self and the city, between the conscious and unconscious, and between multiple selves and urban footsteps. In so doing, she directs attention to the significance of dreams and ghostly matters for thinking about the real and imagined spaces of the city

- by David Pinder
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- Psychogeography, Hauntology, Walking (Art), Sound Art

Nato da un titolo butoriano e nutrito di suggestioni postmoderniste, il concetto di “geografia parallela” incontra in questi anni uno sviluppo carsico ma originale in alcuni ambiti della ricerca urbanistica, antropologica e letteraria francese. Philippe Vasset ha tradotto in narrazione romanzesca alcuni degli esiti di queste ricerche, rappresentando una nuova forma di città contemporanea, che supera la vecchia immagine della metropoli senza centro per aprirsi a spazi che oltrepassano gli orizzonti tradizionali dello studio della città. Si tratta di quelle che vengono chiamate “zone bianche”, aree corrispondenti a coordinate satellitari che non vengono riconosciute dai comuni apparecchi di geolocalizzazione; si tratta anche di forme ipermoderne di ruderi e rovine, tipici della civiltà del tardo capitalismo. Sono spazi rimossi dall’orizzonte percettivo comune, poiché fuoriescono dalle norme del “consumo” e dell’“impiego”. Disertati dall’uomo, questi luoghi hanno mimetizzato i contrassegni dell’antropizzazione e appaiono adesso enigmi da interrogare e studiare attraverso un lavoro archeologico. Questo articolo si propone di indagare la narrativa di Philippe Vasset, e in particolare i romanzi Un livre blanc. Récit avec cartes (2007) e La conjuration (2013), per inserirli in una genealogia teorico-letteraria d’interrogazione dello spazio antropico che va da Walter Benjamin a Georges Perec, da François Bon a Iain Sinclair e arriva fino alla recente attività dell’Atelier de Géographie Parallèle, coordinato dallo stesso Vasset, che riunisce figure di varie professionalità allo scopo di elaborare nuove forme di esplorazione della città e dei suoi margini. Lo scopo è quello di osservare come la narrazione letteraria, con i suoi schemi finzionali, si leghi a esperienze concrete, contribuendo ad avanzare proposte pragmatiche mirate a sovvertire i modi consueti della fruizione degli spazi.

- by Giacomo Raccis
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- Geopolitics, Creative Cities, Walter Benjamin, Novel

in MODERN LANGUAGE STUDIES 40.2 (2011): 102-104.

- by Kevin Flanagan
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- Psychogeography, History Of London, London Writing, Iain Sinclair
- by David Cunningham
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- Contemporary Fiction, Contemporary Literature, J.G. Ballard, Iain Sinclair
- by Niall Martin
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- Globalization, Globalisation and cultural change, Stanley Kubrick, London Writing

Chapter 14: Postmodern cities. 5,000 words. This chapter discusses the two principal strands of the postmodern city novel: texts in which the city is presented as a verbal labyrinth, simulacrum, or technoscape (e. g. the fiction of Auster, Borges, Calvino, Murakami, Pamuk), and texts that depict the city as conceived in postmodern urbanist discourse: the city defined by branded spaces – consumerist simulacra of properly historical urban spaces – existing amidst dilapidated interstitial spaces (e.g., Martin Amis, Bret Easton Ellis, Chuck Palahniuk, José Saramago, Iain Sinclair, but including novels of any comparable city wherever sited), and the entwining of the two strands as the city and the lives it sustains work out their entropic trajectories, primarily absent the sort of crisis that qualifies the fictional city as properly dystopian. The presentation of the subject locates the literature in relation to poststructuralist thought or theories of postmodern urban and social theory by citing relevant theorists. It identifies, as appropriate, the presence and force of redemptive energies in the literature, and highlights the engagements with, and critiques of the history and enabling ideologies of postwar urban (re)development to the extent that they present themselves in the content and the form of the texts discussed.

- by Nick Bentley
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- Postmodernism, Haruki Murakami, Doris Lessing, Angela Carter
- by Simon Sellars
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- J.G. Ballard, Iain Sinclair
- by Paul Carr
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- Music, Music Theory, Musicology, Commercial Music
- by Robert Bond
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- Walter Benjamin, Iain Sinclair

Iain Sinclair’s imaginative mapping of London provided future psychogeographers with an influential methodology for representing a city of occult alignments and secret histories. In the wake of Sinclair’s continued association with the spatial and textual practices from which such speculative theses are derived, the trajectory of the psychogeographical turn that emerges in the 1990s swerves away from the revolutionary impulses of its earlier formation by Guy Debord and others within the radical Parisian avant-garde towards a more literary phenomenon. Patrick Keiller has rebuked this aspect of the psychogeographical turn as indicative of a wider loss of political ambition in the fin de millennium. Two statements by Debord on the relationship between London and love prompt a more nuanced understanding of the double bind of Sinclair’s variant psychogeography. Alongside a problematic fascination with the dark heritage of London, Sinclair has also recovered the fading histories of reforg...

- by Henderson Downing
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- Psychogeography, Love, Situationist International, Iain Sinclair
- by Niall Martin
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- Cultural Studies, Cultural Theory, History Of London, Iain Sinclair